Sunset Limited

by James Lee Burke

  At the vestibule door Father Mulcahy placed his hand on my arm. He was a frail man, his bones as weightless as a bird's inside his skin.

  "This lady carries a deep injury. The nature of her problem is complex, but be assured it's of the kind that destroys people," he said.

  "She's an alcoholic, Father. Is that what we're talking about here?" Helen said.

  "What she told me wasn't in a sacramental situation, but I shouldn't say any more," he replied.

  I walked up the aisle and sat in the pew behind Lila.

  "You ever have a guy try to pick you up in church before?" I asked.

  She turned and stared at me, her face cut by a column of sunshine. The powder and down on her cheeks glowed as though illuminated by klieg lights. Her milky green eyes were wide with expectation that seemed to have no source.

  "I was just thinking about you," she said.

  "I bet."

  "We're all going to die, Dave."

  "You're right. But probably not today. Let's take a ride."

  "It's strange I'd end up sitting here under the Crucifixion. Do you know the Hanged Man in the Tarot?"

  "Sure," I said.

  "That's the death card."

  "No, it's St. Sebastian, a Roman soldier who was martyred for his faith. It represents self-sacrifice," I said.

  "The priest wouldn't give me absolution. I'm sure I was baptized Catholic before I was baptized Protestant. My mother was a Catholic," she said.

  Helen stood at the end of Lila's pew, chewing gum, her thumbs hooked in her gunbelt. She rested three fingers on Lila's shoulders.

  "How about taking us to dinner?" she said.

  AN HOUR LATER WE crossed the parish line into St. Mary. The air was mauve-colored, the bayou dimpled with the feeding of bream, the wind hot and smelling of tar from the highway. We drove up the brick-paved drive of the Terrebonne home. Lila's father stood on the portico, a cigar in his hand, his shoulder propped against a brick pillar.

  I pulled the cruiser to a stop and started to get out.

  "Stay here, Dave. I'm going to take Lila to the door," Helen said.

  "That isn't necessary. I'm feeling much better now. I shouldn't have had a drink with that medication. It always makes me a bit otherworldly," Lila said.

  "Your father doesn't like us, Lila. If he wants to say something, he should have the chance," Helen said.

  But evidently Archer Terrebonne was not up to confronting Helen Soileau that evening. He took a puff from his cigar, then walked inside and closed the heavy door audibly behind him.

  The portico and brick parking area were deep in shadow now, the gold and scarlet four-o'clock flowers in full bloom. Helen walked toward the portico with her arm around Lila's shoulders, then watched her go in the house and close the door. Helen continued to look at the door, working the gum in her jaw, the flat of one hand pushed down in the back of her gunbelt.

  She opened the passenger door and got in.

  "I'd say leapers and vodka," I said.

  "No odor, fried terminals. Yeah, that sounds right. Great combo for a coronary," she replied.

  I turned around in front of the house and drove toward the service road and the bridge over the bayou. Helen kept looking over the seat through the rear window.

  "I wanted to kick her old man's ass. With a baton, broken teeth and bones, a real job," she said. "Not good, huh, bwana?"

  "He's one of those guys who inspire thoughts like that. I wouldn't worry about it."

  "I had him made for a child molester. I was wrong. That woman's been raped, Dave."

  ELEVEN

  THE NEXT MORNING I CALLED Clete Purcel in New Orleans, signed out of the office for the day, and drove across the elevated highway that spanned the chain of bays in the Atchafalaya Basin, across the Mississippi bridge at Baton Rouge, then down through pasture country and the long green corridor through impassable woods that tapered into palmettos and flooded cypress on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. Then I was at the French Quarter exit, with the sudden and real urban concern of having to park anywhere near the Iberville Welfare Project.

  I left my truck off Decatur, two blocks from the Cafe du Monde, and crossed Jackson Square into the shade of Pirates Alley between the lichen-stained garden of the Cathedral and the tiny bookstore that had once been the home of William Faulkner. Then I walked on down St. Ann, in sunlight again, to a tan stucco building with an arched entrance and a courtyard and a grilled balcony upstairs that dripped bougainvillea, where Clete Purcel kept his private investigative agency and sometimes lived.

  "You want to take down Jimmy Fig? How hard?" he said.

  "We don't have to bounce him off the furniture, if that's what you mean."

  Clete wore a pressed seersucker suit with a tie, and his hair had just been barbered and parted on the side and combed straight down on his head so that it looked like a little boy's.

  "Jimmy Figorelli is a low-rent sleaze. Why waste time on a shit bag?" he said.

  "It's been a slow week."

  He looked at me with the flat, clear-eyed pause that always indicated his unbelief in what I was saying. Through the heavy bubbled yellow glass in his doors, I saw Megan Flynn walk down the stairs in blue jeans and a T-shirt and carry a box through the breezeway to a U-Haul trailer on the street.

  "She's helping me move," Clete said.

  "Move where?"

  "A little cottage between New Iberia and Jeanerette. I'm going to head security at that movie set."

  "Are you crazy? That director or producer or whatever he is, Billy Holtzner, is the residue you pour out of spittoons."

  "I ran security for Sally Dio at Lake Tahoe. I think I can handle it."

  "Wait till you meet Holtzner's daughter and boyfriend. They're hypes, or at least she is. Come on, Clete. You were the best cop I ever knew."

  Clete turned his ring on his finger. It was made of gold and silver and embossed with the globe and anchor of the U.S. Marine Corps.

  "Yeah, 'was' the best cop. I got to change and help Megan. Then we'll check out Jimmy Fig. I think we're firing in the well, though," he said.

  After he had gone upstairs I looked out the back window at the courtyard, the dry wishing well that was cracked and never retained water, the clusters of untrimmed banana trees, Clete's rust-powdered barbells that he religiously pumped and curled, usually half full of booze, every afternoon. I didn't hear Megan open the door to the breezeway behind me.

  "What'd you say to get him upset?" she asked. She was perspiring from her work and her T-shirt was damp and shaped against her breasts. She stood in front of the air-conditioning unit and lifted the hair off the back of her neck.

  "I think you're sticking tacks in his head," I said.

  "Where the hell you get off talking to me like that?"

  "Your brother's friends are scum."

  "Two-thirds of the world is. Grow up."

  "Boxleiter and I had a talk. The death photo of the black guy in the drainpipe was a setup."

  "You're full of shit, Dave."

  We stared at each other in the refrigerated coolness of the room, almost slit-eyed with antagonism. Her eyes had a reddish-brown cast in them like fire inside amber glass.

  "I think I'll wait outside," I said.

  "You know what homoeroticism is? Guys who aren't quite gay but who've got a yen they never deal with?" she said.

  "You'd better not hurt him."

  "Oh, yeah?" she said, and stepped toward me, her hands shoved in her back pockets like a baseball manager getting in an umpire's face. Her neck was sweaty and ringed with dirt and her upper lip was beaded with moisture. "I'm not going to take your bullshit, Dave. You go fuck yourself." Then her face, which was heart-shaped and tender to look at and burning with anger at the same time, seemed to go out of focus. "Hurt him? My father was nailed alive to a board wall. You lecture me on hurting people? Don't you feel just a little bit embarrassed, you self-righteous sonofabitch?"

  I walked outside into the sunshine. Sweat
was running out of my hair; the backdraft of a passing sanitation truck enveloped me with dust and the smell of decaying food. I wiped my forehead on my sleeve and was repelled by my own odor.

  CLETE AND I DROVE out of the Quarter, crossed Canal, and headed up Magazine in his convertible. He had left the top down while the car had been parked on the street and the seats and metal surfaces were like the touch of a clothes iron. He drove with his left hand, his right clenched around a can of beer wrapped in a paper sack.

  "You want to forget it?" I asked.

  "No, you want to see the guy, we see the guy."

  "I heard Jimmy Fig wasn't a bad kid before he was at Khe Sanh."

  "Yeah, I heard that story. He got wounded and hooked on morphine. Makes great street talk. I'll tell you another story. He was the wheelman on a jewelry store job in Memphis. It should have been an easy in-and-out, smash-and-grab deal, except the guys with him decided they didn't want witnesses, so they executed an eighty-year-old Jew who had survived Bergen-Belsen."

  "I apologize to you and Megan for what I said back there."

  "I've got hypertension, chronic obesity, and my own rap sheet at NOPD. What do guys like us care about stuff like that?"

  He pressed his aviator glasses against his nose, hiding his eyes. Sweat leaked out of his porkpie hat and glistened on his flexed jaw.

  JIMMY FIGORELLI RAN A sandwich shop and cab stand on Magazine just below Audubon Park. He was a tall, kinetic, wired man, with luminous black eyes and black hair that grew in layers on his body.

  He was chopping green onions in an apron and never missed a beat when we entered the front door and stood under the bladed ceiling fan that turned overhead.

  "You want to know who put a hit on Cool Breeze Broussard? You come to my place of business and ask me a question like that, like you need the weather report or something?" He laughed to himself and raked the chopped onions off the chopping board onto a sheet of wax paper and started slicing a boned roast into strips.

  "The guy doesn't deserve what's coming down on him, Jimmy. Maybe you can help set it right," I said.

  "The guys you're interested in don't fax me their day-to-day operations," he replied.

  Clete kept lifting his shirt up from his shoulders with his fingers.

  "I got a terrible sunburn, Jimmy. I want to be back in the air-conditioning with a vodka and tonic, not listening to a shuck that might cause a less patient person to come around behind that counter," Clete said.

  Jimmy Figorelli scratched an eyebrow, took off his apron and picked up a broom and began sweeping up green sawdust from around an ancient Coca-Cola cooler that sweated with coldness.

  "What I heard is the clip went to some guys already got it in for Broussard. It's nigger trouble, Purcel. What else can I tell you? Semper fi," he said.

  "I heard you were in the First Cav at Khe Sanh," I said.

  "Yeah, I was on a Jolly Green that took a RPG through the door. You know what I think all that's worth?"

  "You paid dues lowlifes don't. Why not act like it?" I said.

  "I got a Purple Heart with a V for valor. If I ever find it while I'm cleaning out my garage, I'll send it to you," he said.

  I could hear Clete breathing beside me, almost feel the oily heat his skin gave off.

  "You know what they say about the First Cav patch, Jimmy. 'The horse they couldn't ride, the line they couldn't cross, the color that speaks for itself,'" Clete said.

  "Yeah, well, kiss my ass, you Irish prick, and get out of my store."

  "Let's go," I said to Clete.

  He stared at me, his face flushed, the skin drawn back against the eye sockets. Then he followed me outside, where we stood under an oak and watched one of Jimmy Fig's cabs pick up a young black woman who carried a red lacquered purse and wore a tank top and a miniskirt and white fishnet stockings.

  "You didn't like what I said?" Clete asked.

  "Why get on the guy's outfit? It's not your way."

  "You got a point. Let me correct that."

  He walked back inside, his hands at his sides, balled into fists as big as hams.

  "Hey, Jimmy, I didn't mean anything about the First Cav. I just can't take the way you chop onions. It irritates the hell out of me," he said.

  Then he drove his right fist, lifting his shoulder and all his weight into the blow, right into Jimmy Figorelli's face.

  Jimmy held on to the side of the Coca-Cola box, his hand trembling uncontrollably on his mouth, his eyes dilated with shock, his fingers shining with blood and bits of teeth.

  THREE DAYS LATER IT began to rain, and it rained through the Labor Day weekend and into the following week. The bayou by the dock rose above the cattails and into the canebrake, my rental boats filled with water, and moccasins crawled into our yard. On Saturday night, during a downpour, Father James Mulcahy knocked on our front door.

  He carried an umbrella and wore a Roman collar and a rain-flecked gray suit and a gray fedora. When he stepped inside he tried not to breathe into my face.

  "I'm sorry for coming out without calling first," he said.

  "We're glad you dropped by. Can I offer you something?" I said.

  He touched at his mouth and sat down in a stuffed chair. The rain was blowing against the gallery, and the tin roof of the bait shop quivered with light whenever thunder was about to roll across the swamp.

  "Would you like a drink, sir?" I asked.

  "No, no, that wouldn't be good. Coffee's fine. I have to tell you about something, Mr. Robicheaux. It bothers me deeply," he said.

  His hands were liver-spotted, ridged with blue veins, the skin as thin as parchment on the bones. Bootsie brought coffee and sugar and hot milk on a tray from the kitchen. When the priest lifted the cup to his mouth his eyes seemed to look through the steam at nothing, then he said, "Do you believe in evil, Mr. Robicheaux? I don't mean the wicked deeds we sometimes do in a weak moment. I mean evil in the darkest theological sense."

  "I'm not sure, Father. I've seen enough of it in people not to look for a source outside of ourselves."

  "I was a chaplain in Thailand during the Vietnam War. I knew a young soldier who participated in a massacre. You might have seen the pictures. The most unforgettable was of a little boy holding his grandmother's skirts in terror while she begged for their lives. I spent many hours with that young soldier, but I could never remove the evil that lived in his dreams."

  "I don't understand how-" I began.

  He raised his hand. "Listen to me," he said. "There was another man, a civilian profiteer who lived on the air base. His corporation made incendiary bombs. I told him the story of the young soldier who had machine-gunned whole families in a ditch. The profiteer's rejoinder was to tell me about a strafing gun his company had patented. In thirty seconds it could tear the sod out of an entire football field. In that moment I think that man's eyes were the conduit into the abyss."

  Bootsie's face wore no expression, but I saw her look at me, then back at the priest.

  "Please have dinner with us," she said.

  "Oh, I've intruded enough. I really haven't made my point either. Last night in the middle of the storm a truck stopped outside the rectory. I thought it was a parishioner. When I opened the door a man in a slouch hat and raincoat was standing there. I've never felt the presence of evil so strongly in my life. I was convinced he was there to kill me. I think he would have done it if the housekeeper and Father Lemoyne hadn't walked up behind me.

  "He pointed his arm at me and said, 'Don't you break the seal.' Then he got back in his truck and drove away with the lights off."

  "You mean divulge the content of a confession?" I asked.

  "He was talking about the Terrebonne woman. I'm sure of it. But what she told me wasn't under the seal," he replied.

  "You want to tell me about Lila, Father?" I said.

  "No, it wouldn't be proper. A confidence is a confidence. Also, she wasn't entirely coherent and I might do her a great disservice," he said. But his face clouded, a
nd it was obvious his own words did little to reassure him.

  "This man in the truck, Father? If his name is Harpo, we want to be very careful of him," I said.

  "His eyes," the priest said.

  "Sir?"

  "They were like the profiteer's. Without moral light. A man like that speaking of the confessional seal. It offends something in me in a way I can't describe."

  "Have dinner with us," I said.

  "Yes, that's very kind of you. Your home seems to have a great warmth to it. From outside it truly looked like a haven in the storm. Could I have that drink after all?"

  He sat at the table with a glass of cream sherry, his eyes abstract, feigning attention, like those of people who realize that momentary refuge and the sharing of fear with others will not relieve them of the fact that death may indeed have taken up residence inside them.

  MONDAY MORNING I DROVE down Bayou Teche through Jeanerette into the little town of Franklin and talked to the chief of police. He was a very light mulatto in his early forties who wore sideburns and a gold ring in his ear and a lacquered-brim cap on the back of his head.

  "A man name of Harpo? There used to be a Harpo Delahoussey. He was a sheriff's deputy, did security at the Terrebonne cannery," the police chief said.

  "That's not the one. This guy was maybe his nephew. He was a Franklin police officer. People called him Little Harpo," I said.

  He fiddled with a pencil and gazed out the window. It was still raining, and a black man rode a bicycle down the sidewalk, his body framed against the smoky neon of a bar across the street.

  "When I was a kid there was a cop round here name of H. Q. Scruggs." He wet his lips. "When he come into the quarters we knew to call him Mr. H.Q. Not Officer. That wasn't enough for this gentleman. But I remember white folks calling him Harpo sometimes. As I recall, he'd been a guard up at Angola, too. If you want to talk about him, I'll give you the name and address of a man might hep you."